Privacy Policy
INTRODUCTION
Last updated: 18 September 2026
Kadampa Meditation Centre Wellington (meditateinwellington.org) complies with the New Zealand Privacy Act 2020 (the Act) when dealing with personal information. Personal information is information about an identifiable individual (a natural person).
This policy sets out how we will collect, use, disclose and protect your personal information.
This policy does not limit or exclude any of your rights under the Act. If you wish to seek further information on the Act, see www.privacy.org.nz
CHANGES TO THIS POLICY
We may change this policy by uploading a revised policy onto the website. The change will apply from the date that we upload the revised policy.
WHO DO WE COLLECT YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION FROM
We collect personal information about you from:
- you, when you provide that personal information to us, including via the website and any related service, through any registration or subscription process, through any contact with us (e.g. telephone call or email), or when you book or use our classes, courses and other activities
- third parties where you have authorised this or the information is publicly available.
If possible, we will collect personal information from you directly.
HOW WE USE YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION
We will use your personal information:
- to confirm your booking and provide the classes, courses and activities you have booked
- to let you know about our classes, courses and events, including by email, where you have asked us to
- to improve what we offer
- to take payment, including authorising and processing card transactions
- to respond to communications from you, including a complaint
- to conduct research and statistical analysis (on an anonymised basis)
- to protect and/or enforce our legal rights and interests, including defending any claim
DISCLOSING YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION
We may disclose your personal information to:
- any business that supports our services, including any person that hosts or maintains any underlying IT system or data centre that we use to provide the website or our other services
- other third parties (for anonymised statistical information)
- a person who can require us to supply your personal information (e.g. a regulatory authority)
- any other person authorised by the Act or another law (e.g. a law enforcement agency)
- any other person authorised by you.
BOOKINGS, PAYMENTS AND DONATIONS
When you book a course or retreat, we collect your name, email address and booking details, and keep a record of your booking. Card payments are handled by Stripe, and donations by Donorbox. We do not see or store your full card number.
EMAIL UPDATES
If you sign up for our newsletter, we keep your email address on our mailing list, which is managed by Mailchimp. Every email includes a link to unsubscribe.
COOKIES AND WEBSITE MEASUREMENT
We use cookies and similar technology to see how our website is used and to let people know about our classes and courses. These include:
- Google Analytics, which tells us how many people visit the site and which pages they read.
- Google Ads, which tells us whether an ad led to a booking. Our ads run through the Google Ad Grants programme for charities.
- Meta (Facebook and Instagram), which tells us whether an ad led to a booking, and allows us to show our classes and courses to people on those platforms.
For Meta, some of this information is sent from your browser and some is sent from our website’s server. When you make a booking, that can include a scrambled (hashed) version of your email address, which Meta uses to match the booking to an account. Meta cannot read the original address from it.
You can turn off cookies in your browser settings. Some parts of the site, such as the booking cart, may not work properly if you do.
INFORMATION HELD OVERSEAS
Some of the services we use — including Google, Meta, Stripe, Mailchimp and our website host — store information outside New Zealand. Before using them, we satisfy ourselves that they protect personal information to a standard comparable to the Privacy Act 2020.
HOW LONG WE KEEP YOUR INFORMATION
We keep booking and payment records for seven years, as required for our financial records. We keep mailing list details until you unsubscribe.
PROTECTING YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION
We will take reasonable steps to keep your personal information safe from loss, unauthorised activity, or other misuse.
ACCESSING AND CORRECTING YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION
Subject to certain grounds for refusal set out in the Act, you have the right to access your readily retrievable personal information that we hold and to request a correction to your personal information. Before you exercise this right, we will need evidence to confirm that you are the individual to whom the personal information relates.
In respect of a request for correction, if we think the correction is reasonable and we are reasonably able to change the personal information, we will make the correction. If we do not make the correction, we will take reasonable steps to note on the personal information that you requested the correction.
If you want to exercise either of the above rights, email us at info@meditateinwellington.org. Your email should provide evidence of who you are and set out the details of your request (e.g. the personal information, or the correction, that you are requesting).
We may charge you our reasonable costs of providing to you copies of your personal information or correcting that information.
IF SOMETHING GOES WRONG
If there is a privacy breach that could cause someone serious harm, we will notify the people affected and the Office of the Privacy Commissioner, as the Privacy Act 2020 requires. If you are unhappy with how we have handled your personal information, please email info@meditateinwellington.org. You can also complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner at privacy.org.nz.
INTERNET USE
While we take reasonable steps to maintain secure internet connections, if you provide us with personal information over the internet, the provision of that information is at your own risk.
If you post your personal information on the website’s reviews or comments, you acknowledge and agree that the information you post is publicly available.
If you follow a link on our website to another site, the owner of that site will have its own privacy policy relating to your personal information. We suggest you review that site’s privacy policy before you provide personal information.